The Promise
by northno.3
Summary: Arranged marriage AU taking place in a historical fantasy, set in a war-torn nameless kingdom. To protect the Amari family's political autonomy, Fareeha is betrothed to war-orphan Angela, at a young age, in a fictitious engagement. Ten years later, burdened with their respective sins, they are brought together through tragic circumstance.
1. Chapter 1

This is a planned series (co-outlined with tinytoffeebean) and will be my first one in a long time. While I do have the story planned out in its entirety, I am learning from my previous mistakes, and will continue writing this series only as long as there is interest.

The fantasy element will be given very light treatment, and will likely only be apparent in the later part of the story. For most purposes, this story is heavily based in realism.

No other character death is planned except for the single one that happens here.

* * *

The attack happens in the middle of the night.

The screams reaches her before she can see the light of the palace on fire, a blaze carved against the black sky, raining ash and soot over their heads. Panic whipped the air, and below her, the streets are quickly overrun, stampeding the weak and slow, a mass of churning bodies slogging over the red-slicked stones of the crushing mobs. It disappears into the descending maw of a war that followed them home, a war they had thought over and vanquished, steel-toothed, rapacious, and smiling.

As she watches the smoke from the palace fire climb towards the sky, Fareeha realizes there's another life she hasn't lived. It belongs to another world, beginning at another time when she had been someone else, when she had been a young girl, kinder, softer, unbloodied and clean. It is a life lived by someone more deserving, images from a fantastical world that disappears on the wind, traced from flames and cinder, melting into the sky and stars.

There were certain truths to Fareeha's character that transcend the possibilities of the universe, their commonalities pulling together as mirrored fragments of herself she has left behind, a mosaic of the person she should have been, the one she could have been. Through their pieces, they sing clear, rising above the clamorous din of a dying city. It's a resonating eulogy mourning the ends of every branching possibility her life could have taken her, every alternative except the one before her, where it all could have taken her: her love for her country, her love for her people, her love for her mother, and a fourth, the one possibility lost to her before she could put a name to all the things she wanted to bring Angela.

She hadn't seen her in years, years spent hiding in a war she so desperately thought would have been her vindication, one she would eventually return from, triumphant in her crusade to prove her wrong, that she could become the person she set out to be. She wonders what Angela looks like now, if she still touched a hand to her hair every time she lowered her head to a microscope, if she still followed her schedules down to the last minute, if she still laughed at the same jokes, if she still smiled the same way.

She wishes it were different, that she had been different somehow, less hasty and stubborn, less prone to rashness. It had created a rift between herself and her mother when she was young, the same way it caused Angela to turn her away on the day of her enlistment (the way it made Fareeha leave home before she was sixteen, angry and full of resentment).

She wishes she had been braver, returned the letters she received, brave enough to put aside her pride and childish ego, to make amends and acknowledge she had been wrong. She wishes she had the courage to go home with the knowledge that it wouldn't have been a defeat, that it still would have been the momentous reunion she wanted. A prodigal daughter returning home.

She wishes she could have been brave in other ways as well. She wishes she could have told Angela how she felt, for the girl who loved Angela for so long, so long ago.

Now, Fareeha directs her horse over the bodies of an old woman and her son, trampling blood and dirt onto pristinely-dyed golden saffron and embroidered indigo as she races towards the palace. The whole city had been caught in mid-celebration (all military forces and auxiliaries called back to the capital, as she had been), all of its people enrobed in their most colorful clothes, eager to revel in the dizzying heights that came with the victorious end to another war (lies, a ruse, what was thought dead in fact revived and strong).

When she was younger, Fareeha had loved celebrations. She imagines in her other life, she musters the courage to invite Angela for a visit just for themselves (when she's older, when Angela looks into her eyes and sees a woman's sincere intentions, sees that their betrothal was more than a paper engagement, that Fareeha's was a real love, enduring and true). Yet the length of her bravery takes her only as far as shy glances, faltering at the space between them as they walk between prize booths and ribboned curtains, her ears flushing hotly as she wastes each opportunity to grasp her hand. Angela's encouraging smile would have ruined her. She would have been happy; the feeling of Angela's hand in her own would have been enough. It would have lasted an eternity.

Fareeha's own campaigns have carried her for miles, ten years spent under the yoke of the military (she had so longingly wanted to join, romantic and idealistic, ready to show them all there could have been a noble cause in its ranks) chasing warlords and would-be princes from one country to the next, the swath of her sweeping war maul carving boundaries and borders into lives too numerous to notch into the handle of any weapon. A priced burden exchanged for miles of land in someone else's name. She wonders if her actions amounted to anything.

As she witnesses the last of a hundred-year-old dynasty fall, she hopes it has, hopes her bloodied hands helped in some way to keep Angela clean of the world, that her time traversing the empire has helped secure the borders containing Angela safe. There is comfort in knowing that in the end Angela would never see the person she has become.

When Fareeha finally rallies her men and they break the doors of the palace into splinters of wood and iron, she realizes that this, too, can be a homecoming.

Outside, the air had reeked of desperation, wet and sickly with fear; reminding her of an open latrine on a hot day, the city sitting with its guts open under the desert night. Inside, the palace has been turned into a charnel house, the air foul with smoke and the tang of blood. She loses half her regiment (what little surviving from the number she was able to rouse) to the task of warding off the advancing fires scaling the palace walls. The other half looks no better, exhausted and minimally equipped for what was to come. They ravenously set upon the bodies, scavenging what small arms and armor they can find.

The marble steps of the grand ballroom is steeped with a muddy hue; Fareeha's heavy footsteps leave streaks across the brilliant stone. Clothed only in the scant protection offered by her leather jerkin and summer cloak (turned sticky and dark), she feels naked without the comforting weight of her chain mail (left behind for a night's entertainment in a moment of carelessness, a lapse in her duty that leaves them all exposed). Someone hands her a bow and quiver (retrieved from a dead soldier, one of too many in a mountainous heap left in the wake of the marauders) but her hand keeps returning to the empty space around her waist, her arm longing for the familiar heft of the weighted chain and spike that had been her constant companion through the war.

Looking around her, she feels the rest of her confidence flee in droves, replaced with a grim reality that she is among the last of an era, standing in the middle of a torrent before it swept her under. When she sees her soldiers finally shatter the siege and break into the inner sanctum, she realizes that she has been tired long before this moment. It has been eons, a lifetime of waiting to reach here (twenty-five years too short, people will say, when to her it has been ten years too long). The war has bred in her like a tumor in her organs, devouring her from the inside, blighting the things that she once drew strength from. She longs to rest, she aches to close her eyes.

When she leads her men to approach the throne room, Fareeha realizes that death brings the same look of fear on the faces of nobility and commoner alike. Without the uniformity of their armor (lost and forgotten in the middle of celebrations made too early, the taste of joy and relief turning into ashes in their mouths), it's difficult to discern her allies from her enemies. The invaders wear the clothes of their people, the same disguise that granted them passage under the victory parades that now camouflages them amongst the servants and palace guards. Each true royal bodyguard and fellow soldier they encounter is a welcome comrade, but they are still too few altogether (too weak) for them to survive.

When they arrive at the final door, she pauses to look among them, seeing the same knowledge in their faces as well.

 _Lead from the front_ , someone had taught her once, _so they know the example to follow._

For the final push, she positions herself with the lancers and shieldsmen. She thanks each of them for their service, humbled in turn when they respond with their indebtedness to her leadership. The weight of their hands upon her shoulders and back honors her more than any gaudy medal buried at the bottom of her dresser, lifts her higher than any commendation given by a queen. In a flickering moment (gone before she can hold onto it, before she can draw strength from its light) she feels invincible.

Someone offers a prayer, but she has already made her goodbyes (and if there really was a God somewhere in the vast indifference of the universe, surely they would grant her a small forgiveness and allow Angela to live out her long years, safe and happy).

When the throne room breaks open, she attacks with hesitant purpose, second-guessing the identity of every man and woman who comes into range of her bow (a deadly talent she intensely repents for leaving unpracticed for so long, a gift from her mother, taken without gratitude). She strikes limbs and joints, giving quarter when she can, picking off the bulk of the would-be usurpers in quick succession in the blink of an eye. When she shoots a man in the head, there isn't time to think about who he might have been before another sets upon her with sword in hand. She counts her arrows with her fingers grasping hungrily at her quiver, growing fewer with every step up the palace stairs. Each one takes a monumental effort and she wipes furiously at a cut in her brow she doesn't remember receiving.

They find a bloodbath, pushing into the cavernous belly of the court, setting upon the insurgents like a wave breaking upon the shore. The sound of armored bodies smashing into each other is deafening, a thunderous clamor of bone and armor crashing over weak skin and muscle.

She stands above it, raining volleys of arrows over the phalanx before being shielded again by the steadfast eaves of their shields. She has been incredibly lucky for coming this far without pause, and grows too daring. A stray arrow slips through the cracks in their barrier, answering her in the thigh, striking her deep and narrowly missing her kneecap (there's no time to assess its damage, no time to do anything except reach down to snap the shaft as close to the wound as she can, her vision tilting wildly as the arrow eventually breaks, digging into her flesh and unleashing a fresh stream of blood).

Behind her, her regiment surges with renewed vigor when they see her at the frontline, heaving against the repelling body of the rebel's fighting force, their battle cries rising in unison in the dark, the names of their country, queen, and lords upon their lips. She recognizes the name of her own house answering back through the chaos. For a long time it seems almost impossible to see anything except the endless wall of armor and rended flesh in the rolling shadows of the low light. For every soldier who falls (pierced through with black fletching, cleaved into pieces) another springs up to take their place.

Her heart stops when she finds the small figure on the ground of the throne room, surrounded by a flagging retinue of a dwindling auxiliary force. She recognizes the colors of their heraldry, the familial pattern of the cloak that covers the woman's shoulders, the same that covers Fareeha's own.

"General!" Fareeha's voice is hoarse, parched, her throat and mouth smacking of blood as she summons the last of her stamina and punctures a hole through the line, allowing her men to follow, galvanized (as she was) by the sight of their country's greatest commander. The two forces join together, encircling their officers in disciplined formation. Their backs pressed together as they meet in the center of the throne room, a meeting years overdue.

"How many arrows do you have?" Ana's voice is clipped, her self-restraint belying her appearance, disheveled, strands of gray hair whipping in currents of hot air. her headscarf torn and stained with splatters of blood (not her own, Fareeha noted thankfully). Fareeha is unsurprised to find that, between them, she is the one who has arrived at the palace more worse for wear.

"Three." Fareeha reports, before spying an archer standing in the gap of their defenses. She dispatches him with a well-placed shot into his eye socket. "Two." She amends grimly. She doesn't dare ask anyone around her for another weapon, afraid that she would be ordering them to surrender themselves to their deaths. She grips the bow tighter in her hand, notching another arrow and taking a deep breath in a concentrated effort to keep her mind present in the battle. The room is spinning; the arrowhead in her thigh weeps blood down the leg of her trousers and pools inside her boot, leaving red footprints from where she walked.

Ana sees through her deception with all the experience of an esteemed army general, all the wisdom of a mother seeing through the lies of her child. "Fareeha, listen to me. The kingdom has fallen. The king is dead." She pauses to pull her bowstring to her cheek, letting loose an arrow from her longbow that puts down a plate-armored warrior through his breastplate. "Take who you can and get out of here."

"I'm not leaving without you!" Fareeha protests fiercely. There is another way, she knows it. They look at each other without words, the urgency of their situation pressing down around them with gleaming blades, swarming with lethal purpose. The moment is too short to hold all the things Fareeha wanted to tell her, all the things she'd seen, all the things she learned. She wants to tell her that she had been wrong. She had been so horribly wrong. She has regretted all their parting words. Looking into Ana's eyes, she knows her mother feels the same way, knows that their years spent apart had been with each other in mind. It's a delicate fringe of solace, her only comfort in knowing that she could have been brought here for a reason other than to die.

In her mind, Fareeha pieces together the routes that have guided her here, what it would take to trace their way back. Ana is small and her armor is light; Fareeha is sure they can make it if they're smart about it. They will, even if she has to carry her. The small light of hope ignited by the sight of her mother flames into a beacon, growing bright and blinding her from her true fate, the one she had recognized so clearly before. The hope brought by their reunion poisons Fareeha's reason, driving her mad with all the fervent desperation of a drowning man clawing for flotsam.

"Don't be foolish!" Ana retorts angrily, her face a desperate mask of horror and anguish. It is the same face Fareeha had seen countless times before, innumerable throughout her battles in her career, endless times through her fight up the city road. It has never been a look she has seen on her mother. It's a clawed hand of fear curling a fist around Fareeha's heart, suffocating and sobering. Its grip tightens into a stranglehold when she sees Ana's eye grow wide, fixed over her shoulder at a sight she couldn't see (too slow, too careless, it will haunt her until the day she dies).

 _General_ is how Fareeha had always seen Ana, an unflinching, unyielding woman, forged by her years at war. _Mother_ is who she sees when Ana shoves her aside, stabbed through by a pike meant for Fareeha's back.

It felt strange that she had seen so many people meet their violent ends in horrible ways, but it's the sight of one person impaled helplessly at the end of a long spear that makes Fareeha lose her mind. She stares at the barbed metal tip that erupts from Ana's body. It didn't make any sense; metal and wood didn't belong inside people. Human bodies weren't supposed to be broken like that.

"Mom!" Fareeha screams.

She's rising, pushing through the chaos, her wounds forgotten. In a single whirling motion Fareeha pulls the shortsword from the sheath at the spearman's waist and decapitates him through the skirt of his helm with a single-handed stroke, unfeeling the burst of red mist that splashes across her face as his head tumbles to the floor with his body. It's an action that is too little, too late. It doesn't amount to anything.

She catches Ana before she drains away. Fareeha's staggering knees finally collapse as she carries them to the ground. She's surprised by how light Ana's body is (how heavy her own felt), how the whole of Ana's person could be so well-contained in her arms.

"You've grown so strong." Ana's voice is barely more than a whisper, her smile breaking through.

The hand that touches Fareeha's cheek is bloodied, trembling with fast-fading life. It feels so frail in her own, so unlike the unfailing steadiness that had walked Fareeha through the sunlit and callow days of her youth, that guided her on horseback through the desert riverlands. Fareeha would die a hundred times to return her mother back to the person from her memories, the one who loved her all those years ago. Without equal, unparalleled, forever.

She wants to tell her mother she doesn't even know what strength meant, wants to ask what it should have looked like. She wants to tell her how much she hates the callousness of her own body, the unfeeling layer that protects her from the rest of the world, how after her enlistment how easy it was for her to grow hardened and pitiless, how different it was for herself (how unlike they were, in the end). How Ana would have been ashamed if she knew the truth, that war became easier for Fareeha with each life that disappeared beneath her hands.

She wants to say she would have traded all of it away (given anything) to be weak again, to be five years old, small and innocent, curled in the surety of her safe embrace, never knowing what it took to be the person to order men to their deaths, the whole of her good intentions never amounting to the cost of hundreds of souls pressing down on her.

Instead, she sobs, begging her not to go, to not leave her here all alone. Her pleas fall on unhearing ears, the light in Ana's eyes fading as she rocks her until she's gone, before a lieutenant's insistent hands finally pull Fareeha from her mother's corpse. It is another kind of death, Fareeha thinks, to be the one left behind, grasping at an empty husk that had once contained so much warmth.

Sturdy hands pull her to her feet, but Fareeha can't see the person they belong to. Her grief turns her blind and deaf and she stares over him, impassive.

"Hold onto your senses! You can't let your mother's sacrifice go to waste!"

The lieutenant is an aged man Fareeha recognizes from her childhood, an able bannerman who served her mother loyally. (His name is on the tip of her tongue; she could retrieve it if she cared to.) It could not have been easy choosing to remain in the service of the Amari family after they fell out of favor so fantastically all those years ago. It's a loyalty hard-bought, bound solely through the power and charisma of her mother that held together the foundations of their house. The men and women who stand with him are similarly devoted, ardent protectors of the Amari lands and name, faithful and true. Fareeha would throw all of them into the black pits of hell if it meant she could bring her mother back.

Distantly (slowly, painfully) she knows he is right. The minutes bought by Ana's death are precious and few, and there are still miles to go. The rest Fareeha has desired for so long remains elusive.

Fareeha had knelt over Ana's body. Something else rises, something that wears Fareeha's skin, that wears her face, moves her deadened limbs, carries her voice, her sorrow, fueled by a singular hatred. The bow and empty quiver forgotten, it looks beyond the lieutenant, relieves him of his handaxe and pushes past him, deaf to his cries as it stalked toward the frontline again. It swats aside a charging swordsman, numb to the tip of his blade breaking through its leather bracer and forearm, responding by slitting him from groin to neck with a passing blow as the stench of his bowels suffused the air.

There is a fraught lull in the battle, as if sensing its arrival, both lines of soldiers remain locked in a fruitless struggle, neither side giving or advancing. The smoke from palace on fire is upon them now, billowing in through the roof and walls. In minutes there would be nothing left of any of them except for their blackened remains and crumbled bones.

The woman who was Fareeha emerges, a void as empty as the corpses she leaves behind, no longer caring about the people who fell before her. More souls thrown onto a scale that broke in her hands, that subsume the balance of good Fareeha had once hoped to achieve, drowning the person she had once been into the depths. The thing that stands is a revenant, carrying the weight that had broken her, relentless within a failing body, hateful and mourning. It stands fearless in the howling jaws of a sure demise, and roars back.


	2. I Only Have Good Memories Of You

Author's Note: The story's fantasy elements will be more pronounced from hereon, most strongly demonstrated in Angela's advances in medical technology and the political structure of the world. We're not done with worldbuilding but this is the best we could manage in single chapter without making it overwhelming. Sorry for the late update, and thanks for following.

* * *

They flee the capital in time.

His horse froths in agony underneath their combined weight, beneath his scourging lashes that drive them faster from the city, further from the burning skeleton of the palace, the horrendous din of screams that mercifully die further into the distance with each mile he puts between the city and themselves.

Days earlier, slipping through the open-aired market of a trade post, he heard how the resurrected city walls rose around the surviving citizens, how the palace guard declared martial law, and how every suspected conspirator and sympathizer was dragged into the city square and put to the sword. He heard how their heads decorated the gates of the palace, a last homage paid to a finally empty mausoleum. He wonders why so many more innocent lives are lost in the reclamation of the city than in the attack itself, what it all might have looked like instead if Ana had somehow survived, how she would have policed the city instead, how she would have struck the balance between mercy and justice.

But Ana is gone, buried in a shady bank of dirt at the heart of a copse of cypresses in the middle of the wilderness, her final rest marked only by a nondescript stone (a poor ending place for a legacy such as hers, but he respects her wishes and the practices that had been so dear to her). He thinks about how he never thought he would be the one to outlive Ana, how out of all the ones to leave home, it should have been him in the ground, how it should have been her to carry Fareeha home.

He affords Ana all the dignity possible, his heart breaking anew knowing that it should have been Fareeha to bathe her wounds, to enshroud her, to say the words over her grave. He leaves three fistfuls of earth, one for Fareeha, one for the daughter Ana adopted in her heart, and one for himself. He doesn't know the language of Ana's prayers but he knew the meaning of this one; he repeats it in his own tongue (bumbling his way through it all, cursing himself in his own thoughts, why couldn't he be as eloquent as what she deserved), hoping that his good intentions carry her to wherever she can find peace.

Fareeha was already fast-fading when he put Ana in the ground, her eyes unfocused and glazed, her skin turned pale and clammy, her breath shallow and pained. Her festering wounds left no time for him to rouse her so that she, too, could pay her proper respects, to say goodbye to her mother, robbed so well of the reconciliation that should have been theirs. His heart pained for Fareeha, knowing how bitterly she had departed her mother's house all those years ago, how much was unsaid between them, all the anger Fareeha kept inside her, all the love Ana had for her but couldn't say.

One day they would meet again, he swore at Ana's grave, pushing his hands over the dirt mound a final time, his fingers pressing into the soft, upturned earth.

One day (he thinks, looking over the lonely plot, the meager gathering of desert flowers, committing the topography, the trees, and the land to his memory, wondering how many graves has he made now, how many friends he put in the earth) when this was all over, he would bring Fareeha to see her.

He travels as fast as he thinks Fareeha's wounds will allow. Racing across the desert, he carries the last remaining survivor of the Amari family, the last daughter of a once-proud house of cavaliers, and now (bound by a common ancestor from a generation so distant no one could have traced the connection through the mires of history without a genealogy book), the last heir to the throne of a crippled empire (a joke, once upon a time, a remote and unlikely birthright layered under the eminence of more prominent houses, one that was never supposed to become hers—a punchline, when years ago he would sweep her small figure into his arms while he besieged her with greetings of _your highness_ , _your royal beauty_ , to laugh at her mud-caked scowl, her red-cheeked indignance at the suggestion she would grow to be anything other than a courageous and stalwart champion of her people).

But news on the wings of messenger birds travel faster than an old man on a flagging warhorse, burdened by the weight of a half-dying soldier strapped to his back (makeshift strips torn from his abandoned cloak, an anchor to hold her in place, to keep her upright as they thundered across the desert). Later (much later, another sun-baked day trodding through the waystations that dotted the roads to the coast, wondering painfully if they will make it, if Fareeha will last through the marching days under a burning sun), he will hear how the royal family was slaughtered down to the last child, along with every member of each major house of nobility, a tremendous and concerted effort, its consequences too far reaching for even him to think that Fareeha was safe just because she escaped the grisly massacre at the palace.

There is an invisible hand moving over them, guided by a power Reinhardt cannot see, rising, shadowing their trailing, beating, hoofbeats as they cross borderlands and ford rivers. It is a force he cannot grasp, an enemy unseen, and he hates his own ineptitude (his obtuseness) so powerfully for not being able to see through it, to not have seen it building. If someone else had been chosen instead, then maybe.

Jack would have seen the way; Gabriel would have known what to do.

But it was only him remaining, the only one whom Ana had trusted to follow Fareeha's campaigns into foreign lands, to protect her from a distance during her daughter's deployments across the empire as Fareeha rose through the ranks.

It had been a task borne of love, rather than out of duty (servitude, slavery) every bone in his body still thinking of Fareeha as the daughter he had taken her as—the second, but no less important, no less precious, no less cherished than the first.

It was his love that pushed him into the burning palace, disguised in the armor of another kingdom, fighting his way through the onslaught to find her amidst the gore and broken bodies, standing in place where Ana had fallen, terrible in her rage, heartbroken and empty.

"Come on, hang on," He would whisper to her in between the long stretches of their journey when huddled together by the fireside he would pour water down her parched throat and wipe the cold sweat from her face. "We're almost there," He would always say, regardless of the distance left, urging Fareeha onward as she nodded feebly, looking at him through heavy eyelids before slumping back into unconsciousness.

Angela would know what to do. Every town physician he met on the way to the coast said the same thing about Fareeha (idiots, village bumpkins all of them, who couldn't put together a poultice for rheumatism if their lives depended on it) but they were all a pale light to Angela's brightness, poor comparisons to the radiance of her intelligence, middling stars dwarfed by her skill and genius. He remembered when, after her career had started to blossom, lords from all over the kingdom began begging contracts for her employment, when the late queen herself had once invited her into the court to serve as royal physician.

The thought occurred to him early on (plaguing him throughout, haunting him as he rode) that Angela herself was also in grave danger, that the same forces that manipulated the destruction of the nation's powerful noble families were also hunting them down to the last member.

The fear is maddening, hot spindles coursed from his gut and up his throat, pushing away sleep and turning all food into ash in his mouth.

Reinhardt is grateful, for the first time in his life, for Ana's careful emotional distance (her famed inability to convey her intentions when she needed to) when she took Angela into her house. He's grateful for Angela's precociousness, her sensitivity, the clear memory of her parents that prevented her from accepting Ana's offer of formal adoption, choosing instead to remain a ward (barely above that of a war slave, one prize among many, plucked from Reinhardt's helpless arms by a king for his greatest generals to enjoy), remembering, as he did, of the family she had been born into, and not the one she had been forced to take.

Instead his mind is focused on another connection, the one that had rung across the kingdom when the agreement was first struck, the one that had caused Ana to fall out of favor and very nearly plunged the Amari family's legacy into ruin. One whose voidness had not been made known.

When the engagement of House Amari's only daughter was announced, the celebratory fanfare had quickly turned to scandal.

Even at thirteen years old, Fareeha was plainly destined for a great military career, certain for fame that would have dwarfed her mother's and elevated their family for generations. Her betrothal to a former slave of war (given over that of the inquiring nobility, an insult to every great house that had offered marriage themselves) couldn't have been taken for anything except House Amari's rejection of the goodwill they had been bestowed.

A marriage might never have been recorded, but for all the world's knowledge, the engagement between Fareeha and Angela was still binding, Angela remaining the dutiful lover who awaited Fareeha's return from war, and Fareeha the pining soldier who longed for home. No one outside the family knew of the engagement's fabrication (a shield made to protect Fareeha from the politics and sickly vices of the royal court, hewn together by Ana and Angela against the monstrous predations of noblemen and women whose interests had been inflamed by a young girl's astonishing—and public—display of military prowess at a tourney all those years ago). Likewise, no one saw how fiercely Fareeha had refused the contract herself, signed in her place by Ana, how deeply it had divided daughter and mother (how Angela's own good intentions had been pushed aside, how it destroyed her friendship with Fareeha, how bitterly they had fought before Fareeha absconded into war).

Ana had been an honorable woman, a trait Reinhardt came to know through years spent in his own brand of service, refusing to abandon the oath he had sworn to House Ziegler as its last surviving knight.

To Reinhardt, Ana's word was enough, and it felt sufficient that the contract was designed to be rescinded and for Angela to regain her choice of marriage upon Fareeha's passing eighteen summers (an occasion spent apart, passing by unremarkably three years after Fareeha had run away, Ana high up in the castle, Angela hiding in a university, Fareeha roaming the desert steppes).

If Fareeha had feared that such a betrothal—even falsified—was an imposition of her family's power lashed upon Angela's shoulders (a betrayal of their friendship, years spent coaxing Angela from the depths of her mourning to convince her that her place in their house wasn't another brand of slavery, that what Fareeha offered was genuine) such safeguards coupled with her mother's reassurances would have been enough. Surely, it hadn't warranted such a vehement denial. Surely, it hadn't been worth the cost of the friendship itself, of robbing Angela so heartlessly.

It was more likely that there was something else he was missing, something between Angela and Fareeha that he failed to notice. He felt wretched, a pretender, a fraud of the great hero he imagined himself to be, exposed as the incompetent, delusional old man he was in reality. He had failed Ana Amari, in the same way he had failed House Ziegler.

He hoped, hearing the distant crashing of waves upon rock and the smell of saltwater reaching him from over the last crest of rocky cliffs, that he would not fail their daughters. That he arrived in time (this time) for the both of them to have the chance they needed, the one they deserved to see each other again.

In all the years afterwards, he could never understand how Fareeha's fervent admiration and fierce adoration could have collapsed into such coldness.

He told himself that when Fareeha awoke, he would ask and try to understand.

The city that held Angela's university sat at the gateway of the river delta, the jewel of all of the nation's trade cities, perched at the edge of the river's mouth that fed foreign merchants, tradesmen, and slaves through the county's immense network of waterways and canals into its heartlands. Its position as the cultural and economic hub of the riverlands brought swarms of peoples from all corners of the world under its vaulting walls, their frigates and schooners funneled into the broad shouldering piers of the city harbor.

He hides them easily among the stream of travelers passing through the city gates, but an armored man on a horse is an uncommon sight to a peaceful province so far removed from the warring desert borderlands. The bloody scuffs on his armor and the limp cloaked figure slumped against his back draw curious glances from the guardsmen, and he hurries his horse around corners into dark alleyways.

Inside, the city thrums with life, teeming at all levels with people from every walk of life, from every colony, every territory and beyond. By contrast, the bowels of the lower city are cramped and squalid beyond the imagination of those who lived in the upper roads of the growing metropolis. But to Reinhardt, this is a familiar hideaway. He blends in readily, dodging between the cloistered dens in which beggars and destitute refugees eked out whatever poor existence they could salvage while eluding slavers. He knows how to maneuver quickly between the makeshift hovels of muddy curtains and pilfered shipping containers. Whatever attention he might have attracted in the upper roads, those gazes are turned away here by the warhammer at his side, and the limp body at his back.

When he finds an appropriately remote and secure quarter of the city, he leaves Fareeha in a room under an innkeeper who barely acknowledges them over the pieces of copper he drops onto the ledgerbook. The room is nothing more than a bed and a chair, but it's a welcome sight after so many days sleeping between the elements and his saddle.

Pulling her boots off, he tucks Fareeha under the bed's threadbare sheet. Her pulse is weaker, and he buoys himself on by pretending the feeble lolling of her neck when he places a pillow under her head is a reply when he tells her that he'll return with Angela. He locks the door behind him and hurries back onto the road, bare-headed, and feeling naked without the weight of his armor.

Without knowledge of the highways, he chases into the direction of the distant spires of the university's rooftops floating on the skyline. He knows the location of Angela's clinic from their correspondence, its address memorized by heart through countless letters chasing each other back and forth across provinces and countries. The winding dirt paths of the lower city gave rise to wide, clean, cobbled streets as he climbed his horse up the coursing roads, higher now above the canals and muddy slums where the beggars and refugees slept in their tented cities. When he broaches the trade quarters, he slows his horse to an appropriate pace and dismount under the watchful eye of the city guard, forcing himself to walk.

His heart swells as he stares pridefully up at the white towers soaring over his head, the ribboned banners of all the merchant houses lining the road. Angela had described it to him before, and he had imagined it all laid out before her, but this was the first time he was seeing it all with his own eyes. He only wishes Fareeha could see it herself.

Dusk has already fallen when he finally finds it. The clinic is just as Angela described, tucked between the textile merchants and the craftsmen, a small half-domed roof with modest windows, lined with planter boxes filled with brushes of green and white leaves.

House Ziegler's sigil had been an ashen-trunked olive tree with thick roots grasping a verdant field. Out of respect to the family that first founded the clinic's operation, the shingle overhanging the clinic's door bore the familiar sigil of a wing-spread golden raptor in mid-flight against a dark blue sky. To say nothing of pragmatism or Ana's justification that this had been the best way to protect Angela from afair, it pained Reinhardt all the same to imagine Angela hanging the sigil of another house, to let all the industry of her genius and work be attributed to the glory of another.

Even so, he thinks that the clinic suited Angela's personality well, yet the closer he approaches the more obvious it was that something is wrong.

Angela saw patients at all hours of the day, through all days of the year, eager to make herself available to rich and poor alike, so long as they were in need. Despite the darkened rooms, the lantern at the doorway signaling Angela's eventual return from a house visit is conspicuously empty as well. Judging from the spotless interior and the film of dust settling over the windows, it appears like the clinic hadn't been open in some time.

His blood chills when he notices the wheelcart resting haphazardly by the door, pushed partially into the otherwise meticulous shrubbery that lined the walkway. Despite the size of the car, there are no horses around to pull it.

The shadows of people moving through the soft light emanating from the interior served proof that Angela was indeed home.

War has made Reinhardt cautious. He fights the urge to rush in, his instincts proved correct when he spied the figures of two unfamiliar men casting long figments against the doorway. He can hear Angela's rising voice through the open window, a tinge of panic coloring her usually soft tones. Whatever Angela is discussing with the men inside is upsetting her. The clandestine nature of the officials' visit troubles Reinhardt as he presses himself closer to the eaves of the building and strains his ears to hear their conversation. Judging by their bearing, both men are military trained.

When he sees one of them grab Angela's arm, he decides that it's all the excuse he needs. His knees creak as he rises. He spares a surveying glance into the front window to see where the officials are before slamming open the door. The door ricochets off the back of one man, slamming the poor sap face-first into a wall. The other releases Angela, turning around before Reinhardt slaps him with the heel of his hand, crumpling him to the floor like a wet canvas sack. Swiftly kicking each of them with his boot to make sure both are indeed unconscious, he looks up to find Angela's shocked expression.

He has forgotten that it, too, has been years since he saw her, his last visit taken when Angela had just won her tenureship. It's been two years since then, more time in between chasing between all three members of the Amari household across different provinces.

They stare wordlessly at each other for a heartbeat before everything clicks into place.

"Reinhardt, what–?"

"No time to explain!" He declares, taking her hand and pulling her to the doorway. The news of Ana's death would have to wait. Fareeha needed her now and the longer she went without Angela's expertise the more they risk losing her.

Just as quickly, Angela pulls her hand away, bewildered and confused. "Did you really think that was the _best_ idea?"

"I was helping!" He protests, shoveling his hands at the hapless men on the floor.

"Helping _who?_ I had this under control! Now I have to explain to the minister how two of his men were attacked in my office!"

Reinhardt knows he made a mistake in rushing this, but he has no idea what he can say to repair the poor entrance he made. He doesn't care what minister Angela is so preoccupied with impressing, or the identities of the soldiers he's so easily disposed of. He knows that if Angela knew everything he did that she would forget all about that kind of unimportant nonsense as well.

"It's Fareeha." He blurts out. He starts to tell her about the coup at the palace, the ensuing massacre at the capital, but he can't find a way to relate everything he needs to without bringing it back to Ana. Perhaps Angela recognizes how difficult it is for him to find the place to start when the piercing ire in her eyes dim, taking in his travel-worn appearance, the blood stains on his sleeves and how monumental it is for him to find the right thing to say. "She's hurt. I didn't know who else to go to so I took her here." For a fleeting second Angela looks as scared as he felt, but almost as soon as it registers in Reinhardt's mind, it's gone, replaced by the calm demeanor of the doctor he and Ana had spent the last decade raising together.

Her voice loses its edge, replaced by the detached voice of a state physician. "I just need a minute."

Looking about, Reinhardt sees that the room is in complete disarray, boxes half-packed with their would-be contents strewn across the floor and tables. Angela falls upon it, hurriedly removing some contents to add others and Reinhardt fights the urge to shove everything inside and grab the whole lot of them. He watches uselessly as she tucks a coil of thin tubing into her satchel before chasing down small bags of liquid from a shelf. She quickly inspects the thin coloring of a dozen vials she slips into a box and puts into her bag, along a carefully enclosed bundle of thin needles. In all of his years spent in triage tents and infirmaries, Reinhardt has no idea how any of those instruments could help Fareeha.

"Reinhardt." When she finishes, Angela lays a gentle hand on his arm, recognizing the fringes of fear that he has barely managed to keep at bay. "It'll be okay."

 _But you don't understand_ , he wanted to say. Angela hadn't seen the battle. She hadn't seen how horrible Fareeha looked when he pulled her from the slaughter, so how could she know? But the steadiness in her eyes stops the words on his tongue, and it's been so long that he's forgotten how easy it is to believe in Angela's tremendous resilience.

Perhaps for all of the speed in which Angela grew up, he half-expected her to stop at some point. He had expected himself to catch up. It feels unfair for Angela, for all of the people that he purported to protect, for all of his years spent as a shield, it was always incumbent upon her to guide him in his failing hours.

He slips onto a nearby bench, allowing himself to pause for a moment, watching the back of Angela's shoulders as she finished moving between the shelves and pulling together the last of her boxes. For the first time in a long time, Reinhardt feels a great weight leave his shoulders.

* * *

The problem is you always think you have enough time.

Someone had told Angela this once. A teacher, or another philosopher-scholar during her university years, or equally likely, an ordinary person with more common sense than a young upstart sheltered in the walls of academia, a girl yet to learn that an excess in intelligence did not make up for a lack of wisdom. It could have easily been Ana herself, years ago, trying her best to impart lessons onto an angry child not yet ready to accept her parental overtures (a soldier's pretended gestures made to assuage her own guilt, a request for forgiveness Angela couldn't give).

When the deputy ministers tell her about Ana's death, she is surprised by how well-prepared she is for it. Ana had been an esteemed warrior, a celebrated and decorated veteran-commander of multiple battles, from even before Angela had met her. As much as Angela had grown to love and respect her, Ana's strict obedience to her duties (the circumstances that gave rise to their shared household) had long resigned Angela to the likelihood of Ana's fate, the one that had come for every general that stood in Ana's place before. Regardless of the terms they had parted on, Angela mourns the person Ana tried to be for her, the one who had cared enough to try.

Angela supposes it comes as a cost of having lived the same life twice over (from within two different countries, two different persons from different families, a small child she doesn't remember being, a woman she's not yet comfortable living), how she so easily and dispassionately views the price of victory and defeat.

But it is the news of Fareeha's disappearance that sapped the light from Angela, the knowledge that there had once been an unspoken promise of a reunion that would never come true, and all of a sudden she felt the world around her growing larger, spinning, and her standing in the middle, falling smaller within it. She wanted to hold onto something, anything (and what did "missing" even mean when it surely couldn't have amounted to anything larger, anything more significant than the feeling that there had been something absent from her since the moment Fareeha had turned her back and alighted on the road, her figure disappearing fast against the horizon all those years ago).

A long time ago, Angela had wished for a different life for Fareeha, and it was this desire, she knew, that tore them apart in the end.

It always seemed to her that Fareeha had been destined for a better life than the one she inherited, guided by her mother's insistence that the young girl rise above the grisly origins of their house and learn the ways of governance, stewardship, diplomacy, and peace. But as headstrong as she was, surrounded by the portraits of her ancestors (taking clandestine lessons with Reinhardt on summer nights, when unbeknownst to her, Angela would peek out from the library window and watch the small girl chase her dreams with wooden sword and shield) Fareeha, perhaps, knew of no other way to grow than to follow the examples she admired.

In that moment Angela would have given anything for the chance to see the Fareeha she remembered, one last time, to go back to that night when Fareeha was war-bound and only fifteen, to take back everything she had said and ask for her to wait. To ask if she could give it another hour, another night, month, year, and say that time moved fast enough and Fareeha didn't have to chase it when Angela wanted her to remain just as she was— beloved, happy, and safe.

It was easier for Angela to determine what little the deputies actually knew, nothing more than what they had said about Ana, nothing of substance in place of the spouting patriotic platitudes that the memory of the sacrifices of the Amari family would live on in the new age to come.

Angela hated them powerfully for their cheap words, the ones offered in place of the greatness of the lives their (late) king's endless conflicts had swallowed up. She hated the people who prattled them and she hated, even more, the unquestioning people willing to receive them, desperate and pathetic attempts to rationalize the gravity of their personal loss. But Angela has never been of that sort, the kind to shy away from the horrors of what war truly was and all it entailed. She unflinchingly bears the truth, that thousands of lives have evaporated for nothing.

The deputies (before their quick disposal) were helpful enough to remind Angela of her alien status, informing her that with the collapse of the Amari house and the lack of a recorded marriage on their registry that Angela no longer had its protections as their ward, requesting she turn over her visa and report to the foreign ministry for removal proceedings. Angela had let out a bitter laugh, sharing in on the insult that had followed so brazenly. She would have imagined that after so many years she would have grown used to being treated like something less than human, second-class, a non-entity (invisible and powerless in a foreign country that had enslaved her and made her genius its trophy, turning the hope of her creations into a scourge on its helpless civilians).

Angela's childhood discoveries had helped expand the country's asylum policies, issuing thousands of visas to refugees in the wake of the mandatory immunization program she unwittingly helped create. It wasn't until years later when the public noticed that the sharp decline of infectious disease was accompanied by a complete cessation of new births among the refugee population, that the true purpose of the immunization program came to light. It wasn't until they discovered that the process was irreversible that Angela realized the full gravity of what she had unknowingly done.

When she was younger, Angela pled innocence, hopeless and sad attempts to salvage the image she had of herself, that she could still be the person she wanted to be. She had been so young (she didn't know, how could she have known when she was only fourteen and so eager to prove her worth—to show that she was more than just chattel—staring at removed theories presented to her on parchment, her own version of puzzles and building blocks). She had no one to guide her skills, her naivety and intelligence exploited by the same government that enfettered her.

In the ensuing riots and civil violence, Angela wonders if it is a blessing or a curse that her name was never attached to the program itself, her recruitment and involvement been procured through covert channels and a shadow agency. She wonders where Gabriel is now (if he had known the real intent behind the immunization program before he had convinced her and Ana of its necessity, if his soul had been bought and sold long before he placed his hands on her shoulders).

But they were all only convenient excuses to distract her from the fact that her ambitions had blinded her, that she could have easily gleaned the Crown's intentions from Gabriel's guidance of her research. Ultimately, the decision had been her own. Angela had bought into an illusion wholesale, seduced by a romantic fantasy that one day she would rise above the circumstances of her orphaning and enslavement, and change the world for the better. She dreamt of bringing a better life for others like her, casualities of the first war, the refugees of defeated kingdoms forced to leave their homes. She dreamt of bringing an end to their ailments, the illnesses that plagued them, ushering in a new post-war era where their children would never go hungry or be subject to the most base pestilence. She dreamt of making a legacy of her own, one outside of the Amari family, carving her name into a world that would remember that House Ziegler had once lived, once upon a time, and she, too, had been someone important.

But instead of a renewed legacy, the great sins of her work now rise above her, a somber epitaph underneath the image of the young, brilliant physician she should have been. For all the lives she had saved, generations more were extinguished by her actions, gone before they could have been born. An unknowing contributor or not, Angela had been an accomplice in the genocide of her own countrymen and their allies.

In their early years, Fareeha had saved Angela's life in ways the younger girl would never truly know, rescuing her countless times with a child's unyielding and ignorant admiration (hidden from the truth of what Angela had done, a secret they had all kept Fareeha from out of respect for Angela's wishes, the one part of her she couldn't bear Fareeha to know, the one person she couldn't lose). And as much as that admiration had been based on a false image, a figment Fareeha imagined her to have remained as, Angela desperately held onto it, clinging to the prodigy that had been so full of potential, the mentor who had been so idolized. She wanted to believe that she could be that person still, that in a world cleaved between good and evil that she still fell on the side of the righteous. There were some things Angela couldn't bear to destroy, no matter how false, and Fareeha had given her the confidence to believe in herself again, pushing back her despair and replacing it with a powerful, yearning hope that Angela could live a life earned through redemption.

Now it's nearly a full decade and she holds Fareeha's life in her own blood-stained hands, exultant in their homecoming, horrified of all that it implied, knowing that this time, for sure, she would have to tell Fareeha the truth. This time, she would have to tell Fareeha what she had done and unveil herself as what she truly was. There was no war to separate them, no contrived engagement to hide behind that weighed down their unspoken words, the things Angela should have told her then and would tell her now, _don't leave again. Stay. You don't have to chase your mother's legacy, you can make your own life. You're beyond her, you've always been better than her._

Fareeha lies on the room's single bed, sleeping precariously under swathes of bandaged linen and alcohol. A line of rubber tubing led an overhanging bag of salt and sugar water into her veins, feeding medicine and much-needed nutrients into her starved body. Her wounds had festered, and Angela was afraid that Fareeha had already incurred blood poisoning. There was only one vial left of the carefully tended bacteria culture Angela had spent seasons cultivating. After its dosage, Fareeha would have to fight the rest of the infection on her own. Despite her sureness in their efficacy, many of the treatments Angela administered were still in the infancy of their design, the resulting combination of her newly formulated treatments and Torbjorn's skill in crafting the instruments she envisioned. As unproven as they were in Angela's medical community, she took heart in knowing that the same detractors would have condemned Fareeha's fate after only a brief exam. She took confidence in her own abilities, and that of Fareeha's stubbornness in not knowing what life-threatening injuries were supposed to be.

Angela had done her best to be thorough in packing and she thought Reinhardt was going to have a heart attack through the time she kept him waiting. All the same, Angela bitterly regrets not having more, for allowing the ministry to confiscate so much from her in the previous weeks. She curses her own carelessness that led to their discovery of her research, that risked the lives of all the people she endeavoured to save, that now risked Fareeha's.

Angela sits in silence as Reinhardt finishes telling her how they barely managed to escape the city with their lives, wiping away tears from his face when he recounted how he buried Ana in the middle of the desert, how he rode for days afterwards, afraid that Fareeha might slip away at any second, terrified that Angela had been taken already.

"She wanted to protect Fareeha so much." Reinhardt's hands fists into white ridges of bone, toothed and bloodless, over the handle of his belted mace. Angela watches him recall how completely useless he was when he saw Ana fall in Fareeha's place, hating himself for his inattentiveness. Angela inwardly disagrees, knowing that without him Fareeha would have been lost to her own grief, how the younger girl would have rather died on her feet than let anyone else walk out alive while her mother laid dead.

"If Ana had wanted to protect Fareeha so desperately, she wouldn't have taught her how to fight." She hears herself answering hollowly.

"Angela." Reinhardt says softly, but she shakes her head, unwilling to hear his poor justifications.

She is tired of losing people she loved. Things like honor and duty were empty aspirations disguising the chains that held them to their true masters, the means by which the ruling classes held down those below them.

Because wasn't that the reason for her own salvation, the reason why Ana had rescued Angela from the slave stocks? What other purpose would a noblewoman have for a ten-year-old child other than to use her as a bitter reminder, knowing that if fate had been different—if it had been Angela's father who had won the battle and Ana who lost—that it would have been Fareeha standing small and naked on the auction block. Hadn't Angela's place been that of a constant, terrible memento of that other life? Hadn't Angela's fate been enough of a deterrence?

All the same, Angela is grief-stricken (heartbroken, distraught, robbed of a family for a second time) but above all, she is angry. She is angry at the world, the savagery of the empire, Ana for leaving them, Fareeha for having followed her mother into a legacy certain to end with her own ruin, her death. Above it all, Angela is angry at herself for not having persuaded the younger girl from its doomed path.

She is lashing out, and she tells Reinhardt so, apologetic. She is being unfair. She can't fathom what it must have been like for Anam (for any mother in her position) to raise a daughter knowing that there could be one day she would have to offer her to a battlefield.

In truth, it was because of Ana that Angela never had to learn what it was like to truly be a slave in the first place (and for his part, neither had Reinhardt, both of them ushered from the king's camp by Ana's soldiers so quickly after their bequeathal that they hardly had to witness what came to the others captured with them).

Ana famously did not keep slaves on her estates and to the best of Angela's knowledge, Ana neither suffered the ownership of slaves from her vassal lords nor the common people within her province (Angela's ownership being a famous curiosity, an inexplicable anomaly, that—until lately—remained the subject of court gossip).

It wasn't until Angela was older, when it came time for her to venture into the world to make her own fortune (to test the paths of the destiny she swore she could take for herself, to discover whether her redemption could indeed be won, whether her hands had the capability to carve a life for herself, to make a cure for the same curse she had afflicted) that Angela finally saw the life she had been saved from, a life of abject horror, a witness to others' subjugations, in the worst ways imaginable, base degradations of everything she thought a human body could endure.

It shamed her that her privilege had blinded her to the enormous act Ana had done by taking her into her house as her ward, by raising her alongside Fareeha, as her own. When Angela grew older she understood how deeply Ana cared for her beyond her guilt, the great sin wrought by the atrocities of her military career. And when she was eighteen, when it was time for Angela to finally leave for the hallowed halls of a prestigious university (reserved for the noble classes, the elite, ivory towers she would never have been able to buy into on her own), Ana had taken her aside, and reminded her that even if she didn't give Angela their name, that she would always be a member of their family.

Angela's eyes had welled at the sight of the signed papers that granted her freedom, that made real what she had only felt, pressed into her hands and accompanied by Ana and Fareeha's hopeful smiles, reassuring Angela that this was not a goodbye, but a map with which to trace herself home, a candlelight in the window for her to follow, a glowing hearth, and strong shoulders to lean on. An oath, given by the most honorable line of warriors Angela had come to know, that no matter where Angela traveled in the world that she would always have a place to return.

Angela knew that the first war had taken her innocence in a different way, and replaced it with the ability to see things as they were, and not as what she hoped them to be. Her kindness and good intentions aside, Ana's contravening actions prevented Angela from seeing the older woman as anything except a powerful cautionary tale: a blunt instrument, a warhound that had no say in its master's designs. Still, in that moment, wrapped in their combined embrace, Angela loved them both with all her heart.

In the background, Reinhardt's soothing voice is a distant sound, and Angela can't stop staring at the image that has taken root before her, that through Ana's sacrifice, after long last, Fareeha has returned, her survival Ana's last gift to them. Angela's hands are still clasped in her lap, clenched tightly to disguise how terribly she is shaking. Her body feels heavy, tired, too exhausted to cry, but scarcely allowing herself to believe that this is real and not some sort of delirium. She couldn't bear the thought that it might be taken away from her again; she didn't think she could survive it a second time.

"Will she be okay?" Reinhardt interrupts her vigil. When she glances over to him, he looks uncharacteristically lost, an expression she has grown too familiar with on the faces of countless patients and their loved ones. It feels strange that she sees it from him now.

Reinhardt has always been fearless, quick to defend and quick to believe what his superiors told him. She doesn't have the same assurance (she used to, once upon a time, and she envies his ability to maintain it, that through their shared beginnings and their common past, he somehow kept his power to trust in others and she has lost everything). But in their relationship, she has always been the one looking to him for support and guidance as the second father she needed.

Privately, she wonders if Reinhardt made the right choice in bringing Fareeha here, not sure if she still deserves Reinhardt's unwavering faith in her skills. She's not the person she left home as, nor the physician she promised herself she would become. She has spent her time away from them, selling her soul piecemeal as she worked on the same project she swore to dismantle from within, waiting for a window, a chance of a payoff she's not sure will ever arrive in time. She summons all the practiced confidence that came with having lived this separate life (the altruistic physician she has pretended to be) when she nods and Reinhardt's face soothes into relief.

She urges him to sleep, reassuring him that she would wake him if she needed anything. He protests, despite how exhausted his body must feel after his journey, but his eyes grow heavy with each passing minute and Angela reaches for a nearby blanket to cover his knees. When he protests, she shushes him firmly and subjects him to the confines of the armchair with a pointed raise of her eyebrows.

"I swear, the two of you are more stubborn than I am." He mumbles before he finally drifts off to sleep, missing the fond smile Angela gives him in reply to his last insistence that the two of them should talk everything out because he wasn't going back to being their translator again.

But for her, Angela still feels like she's on pins and needles, the adrenaline from earlier that evening still humming through her body. The moon hangs bright in the cloudless sky, and Angela wonders if there were times on her travels that Fareeha would remember the home she left behind, and think fondly of her overprotective mother, the grizzly old man who mussed her hair too hard, and her mother's bossy ward who always chased her with a comb to tie her braids back into place.

Fareeha has grown. It seems such an obvious discovery, taken form while Angela had labored over Fareeha's injuries. But Angela can barely recognize the young girl Fareeha had been in this older body, taller and stronger, bruised and wounded. It's difficult to reconcile that girl with the woman in front of her as having lived a completely separate life that had nothing to do with her, waging war in the name of the king that destroyed Angela's country, guarding an empire Ana didn't believe in, killing other cavaliers, hunting knights that could have been Reinhardt. It reminds Angela of how far Fareeha had come all on her own, without them.

Fareeha's body shows the paths her life has taken her, well-muscled, and bearing the marks of old battles. Each scar has its own history, incurred and healed in Angela's absence. They remind her that there are entire chapters of Fareeha's life that have elapsed without her knowledge. They had grown up together, and grown apart. As much as Angela wanted to believe that there were parts of them that have remained the same, she wonders how much of that stemmed from her own selfishness in not wanting to believe that Fareeha has faced all the obstacles of her life without her.

She imagines Fareeha facing that tremendous fear alone, plunging into the inferno of the throne room to chase after her mother, arriving only in time to witness an outcome that would have happened anyway.

For all of her desire to hold Fareeha's hand (to give a small comfort in her sleep, to comfort herself, to make proof that this moment was real, to remember times when they were younger and Fareeha had done this same thing for her on nights when Angela had been plagued by old memories and night terrors), Angela can't bring herself to cross the last centimeters, her fingers resting a thin measure of distance away on the duvet. Fareeha had rejected her quite clearly; their friendship was a relic of the past, and as much as things had changed for Angela in these few moments, she knew that nothing had changed for Fareeha at all.

But this closeness is enough. It's more than Angela ever dreamed of; it's more than she deserves. Watching Fareeha's chest rise and fall with each even breath steadies Angela, centers her, pulls her from the crushing despair that had consumed her.

She's already decided that she's content just like this. She tries to treasure this brief respite, this moment all hers, knowing that in the morning it would be gone.

Angela falls asleep slowly, studying the face of a stranger.

It wasn't as easy as Reinhardt imagined. There were some things you couldn't say, even if you wanted to.


End file.
